Ringfort (Rath), Newpark, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ringforts
On an east-facing slope in the uplands of County Tipperary, the ground holds the faint memory of something that was deliberately erased.
What survives is a slight depression, roughly 32 metres across at its widest, enclosed by a barely perceptible rise in the earth no more than ten centimetres high. A faint vegetation mark traces where a fosse once ran, a fosse being the external ditch that typically accompanied a ringfort's enclosing bank, and a later field boundary cuts across the northern edge as if to finish the job of erasure that reclamation began.
Ringforts, also called raths, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used as a farmstead or place of shelter. This particular example in Newpark was recorded in some detail as recently as 1954, when a sketch plan and cross-sections were made showing an oval enclosure measuring approximately 50 metres north to south and 36.5 metres east to west, with a bank still substantial enough to carry a field boundary along its top. Less than a decade later, around 1963, the site was levelled during land reclamation, reducing what had been a legible monument to the shallow, ambiguous earthwork visible today. The contrast between the 1954 drawings and the present ground surface is itself a quiet record of how rapidly the agricultural changes of the mid-twentieth century reshaped the Irish countryside, often eliminating sites that had survived for more than a thousand years.